How to Make Chèvre

Chèvre is a soft, delicious, creamy cheese made from goat milk.  It is great for crackers and dips.  It is very easy to make.  First, you need a goat!  Annie, our Nubian goat will provide the goat milk to make our chèvre.  I coax her up onto her milking stanchion and when she puts her head in the squeeze, I lock her in.  She'll get to eat some dairy ration while I milk her in a minute.

A couple of things to note in the picture below.  First, I hobble her left rear leg so that she is not quite as mobile.  Otherwise, she begins stomping her feet.  She's really not a good milker, but we still put up with her stomping foolishness and milk her once a day.  Her momma, Nellie, was a very good milker.  You can see that her teats are full of milk. Time to get started.

We use a quart sized mason jar with a muslin cloth rag fastened over the opening with a rubber band that serves as a filter to keep out hay and goat hair.  We wash her teats with a washcloth and then we simply milk her.

Milking a goat doesn't take long.  In no time flat, I have almost a quart of fresh goat milk. It is warm.  The photo below looks odd as it looks like there is a bird sitting on the edge of the jar about to drink some of the goat milk, but it really isn't.  That is a chicken in the background sitting on the barn gate.

We bring the goat milk inside and put it in the fridge.  Now in order to make chèvre, you have to use a culture.  We get ours from culturesforhealth.com.  It comes with instructions below and packets of chèvre starter.

We used a half gallon of goat milk and heated it to 86 degrees Fahrenheit.  Do this very slowly and then remove from the heat.  Add 1 packet of chèvre starter and mix it up.  Then cover with a lid and let it culture in a warm place for 12 hours. Once 12 hours have passed, the culture is set.  You can see the whey has separated from the curds.

We place the curds in a muslin cloth and let the whey drip out of the cheese.  We pull the edges of the cloth up to make a bag and let the whey drip through the cloth into a jar for 12 hours.

After 12 hours your cheese looks like this:

Here is the whey that we captured in jars below.  We'll save this whey for future use.  Lots of times we will pour it in a dish for the chickens.  They love it.

We chopped up some parsley and some dried dill that we had in the herb pantry and added to the chèvre.

You can roll it into a ball, place in a bowl and drizzle some good extra virgin olive oil over it.

It is snack time!  Perfect for dipping with a cracker.

For the second ball, we rolled the herbed chèvre in chopped pecans.

Chèvre is a delicious cheese that is very easy to make.  We will continue to make and consume this cheese.